This is my blog for posting material of academic interest (to me). Expect to see stuff about Greek and Roman history, archaeology, Classical literature, the Ancient Near East, historical films, teaching, the reception of the Classics in science fiction, the abuse of history, science fiction criticism, and occasionally other historical stuff. Expect spoilers at all times.

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Round my place, watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special and then saying 'Oh dear' has become as much a tradition of Christmas as sprouts and arguing over Trivial Pursuit. Truth to tell, last year I wasn't able to engage in that quite as much as previously. And this year, I have to say I did this even less. Hell, 'The Return of Doctor Mysterio' is okay - arguably Peter Capaldi's best special. But does that mean it's actually any good?

There are definitely good things about it. Capaldi's performance is becoming progressively more appealing. Steven Moffat's ability to write excellent dialogue, well-remembered from Coupling, but something that has got a bit obscured at times on Who, is particularly on display here - the words positively crackle at times, and some bits are laugh-out-loud funny. There are some great bits, especially the scene with Mr Huffle, played well by Capaldi and Charity Wakefield. Matt Lucas, despite essentially portraying Matt Lucas, works quite well as a foil for the Doctor, loosened from the shackles of Clara Oswald - and also demonstrates that the Doctor did care about the fate of those cannibalized into the Hydroflax (one assumes he restored Ramone as well). It will be nice to see more of him, though one assumes that he will depart fairly soon after the arrival of new female companion Bill (who seems very much in the mould of RTD companions such as Rose Tyler and Donna Noble rather than that of Amy Pond or Clara). And 'The Return of Doctor Mysterio' is certainly a story that's not opaque to anyone who hasn't seen the last three years of the show, thus enabling it to act as an entry point for new viewers.

And yet. And yet, at the risk of sounding like a grinch in the face of good reviews in the press and a Facebook feed full of friends saying how much they enjoyed this, concerns remain. Concerns that the alien invasion plot, part Spearhead from Space, part 'Partners in Crime' and part Independence Day, is a bit hackneyed, really. Concerns about the callous way the Doctor doesn't even attempt to save Brock, or feel bad about not being able to do so. Concerns that there are good ideas here, but they're often poorly executed. That things happen solely for a quick effect (e.g. Grant calling someone he's known since childhood by her married name, for no other reason than to surprise the audience once we see who she is; and why does the Ghost need to take the picnic basket into the stratosphere when it's destine for no further away than the roof of the building he lives in?). That the central romance is a bit stalkery, in the way of all good Hollywood romances. That even by the 1960s superhero stories had mostly given up pretending that you can bring a spaceship to an instantaneous stop without turning it and its contents to mush. That this sort of playful but respectful updating of the superhero genre is better done in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies (to which 'The Return of Doctor Mysterio' plays explicit homage) or, more recently, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And is just okay good enough anyway? Aside from the Doctor's cameo in Class, this is the first Doctor Who in over a year. It really needs to come back firing on all cylinders.There are hints that there is a growing faction within the BBC that, as in the 1980s, sees Doctor Who as something forced upon them rather than something that they want to make. Depending on which rumours you believe, these forces may be demanding that Capaldi goes after the next series. As it happens, I expect Capaldi to go anyway* - there are precedents for coinciding a new producer with a new Doctor - not just Moffat and Matt Smith, but (more-or-less) Barrie Letts and Jon Pertwee, and Philip Hinchcliffe and Tom Baker. In any case, by the end of 2017 Capaldi will have done three series over four years, the same period in the role as David Tennant or Matt Smith. Perhaps firmer evidence for internal BBC hostility, if still anecdotal, is that I don't recall seeing a single trailer for 'The Return of Doctor Mysterio', whereas trailers for Sherlock are inescapable. In that context, Doctor Who really needs to assert its place in television's schedules, and I'm not sure 'The Return of Doctor Mysterio' does that.

So, the best special of the Moffat era, probably. But I can't see 'The Return of Doctor Mysterio' carving out a place for itself amongst the greats of the show.

(For a far more sympathetic response to the episode, read Matthew Kilburn here.)

Monday, December 26, 2016

[This is another old Doctor Who Christmas special review. It includes spoilers.]

Though I haven't talked much about it of late, it's no particular secret amongst my friends that I am not a great fan of Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, especially not the last few years. I didn't really care for the first Peter Capaldi series, and whilst the second has been better, I still wouldn't follow some of my friends in declaring it the best series since Who returned. It's certainly the best series involving Clara, but that's quite a low bar.

On the positive side, Capaldi is settling into the role quite nicely, in contrast to the first series, where he was as patronising as Jon Pertwee's Doctor and as manipulative as Sylvester McCoy's, but lacked the charm of either. And the Doctor and Clara Oswald are at least no longer lying to each other, which is pleasing. But the series veered from moments that were actually quite clever (some of the stuff with Davros, and the misdirection achieved through the use of the word 'me') to moments that were so arch that you just wanted to slap everyone involved (e.g. every moment that involved a guitar). And Moffat's writing has become the equivalent of Murray Gold's music - it beats you around the head with the emotion that you are supposed to be feeling, and just in case you didn't get the message, it does it again. (The most egregious example of this is the Eternal Death Scene of Clara Oswald.)

Nor have I been much of a fan of the Christmas specials. In contrast to the 1970s, when BBC Christmas specials meant pulling out all the stops and topping anything that had been done in the rest of the year, nowadays the idea seems to be that, as the audience will be half-cut and sleeping off Christmas dinner, it isn't necessary to try too hard. This has resulted in a number of 'specials' that have been incredibly lazy ('The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe'; see The Terrible Zodin, issue 13, pp. 80-82), or at worst utterly incoherent ('The Time of the Doctor').

So I approached 'The Husbands of River Song' with some trepidation; my inner response to Moffat's question 'what could be more special than the return of Alex Kingston as Professor River Song?' was 'hang on, I'll get you a list.' But actually, there were moments in this where I actually smiled, and was enjoying the interplay between Capaldi and Alex Kingston. There were also moments when I was thinking "oh, get on with it", of course. And it's quite true, as Matthew Kilburn notes, that this episode had a lighter tone that was out of kilter with the rest of this season. As I only just finished catching up with the previous episodes just before Christmas, this tonal shift towards comedy, emphasized by the casting (and slight wasting) of comic actors, was particularly notable. But overall, this was okay. I'm certainly prepared to agree with those who say that it was the best Christmas special for a while - though that is a pretty low bar. And however much I enjoyed it, there is still a nagging feeling that this is a series preoccupied by glitz and flash over story, presided over by a showrunner running out of ideas, who really ought to move on.

[This is an old review from 2013 from another platform that I'm putting up here to provide some background to my forthcoming review of 'The Return of Doctor Mysterio'. You will see my prediction at the end turned out to be correct. Oh, and spoilers, of course.]

Though I didn't blog about it at the time, I really enjoyed 'The Day of the Doctor', the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special. It was far from flawless, but it pulled me in, and worked its emotional magic. However, I also remembered that most of the Steven Moffat Christmas specials had been pretty un-special (you can read what I thought of the 2011 one in The Terrible Zodin, issue 13, pp. 80-82), so I wasn't holding out any hopes for this one. I was right to take that position, for 'The Time of the Doctor' vies with 'Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS' for being the worst Doctor Who of the Moffat era.

Moffat pretty much just put up on screen all the notes he's been keeping about how the time crack, the Silence, the question hiding in plain sight, Trenzalore and the Lore of the Twelve Regenerations should be resolved, without troubling to knit them into a coherent story or to give them any emotional weight.

Exactly. This was presumably intended by Moffat to be the great culmination of the arcs he has been developing ever since 'The Eleventh Hour'; instead, it seems like he's gathered together a series of plot ideas he'd got bored with and not finished off properly, and resolved them all in such a way that the viewer is left thinking 'is that all there is to the Silence/TARDIS destroying the universe/crack in time/etc.?' All this in what is not so much a story as a series of vignettes knotted together, that leave one constantly asking 'What's going on? Who are they? Why are people doing this?' (As an aside, I note that Moffat's previous Christmas specials relied on other people's stories - Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, and the original Patrick Troughton Yeti tales. Here it's all Moffat, and there isn't anything there.)

It may be that Moffat was instructed to resolve a load of hanging plot threads. But I'd argue that if that was part of the problem, then he brought that on himself through leaving big plot threads unresolved. The big question at the end of Series 5 was who blew up the TARDIS - this gets quickly forgotten in Series 6, as we switch to the whole Impossible Astronaut story. And did we ever actually find out why Amy Pond can't remember the Daleks?

I think this is actually the downside of the legacy of Joss Whedon. Few people have been as good as him at balancing the arc plot and standalone episodes - yet everyone feels compelled to try.

The Matt Smith regeneration scene also seemed like an anti-climax. Moffat seemed to be trying for the emotional weight of the David Tennant regeneration (some aspects of which I didn't like), but falls well short. Oh, and the joke about the Doctor and Clara Oswald being naked is as ill-judged and unnecessary as the fellatio gag in 'Love and Monsters'.

I taught a 1968 Who story as part of my course on 'London in the Literature of the Fantastic' at the University of Notre Dame this past semester, and that sparked a very interesting conversation with those students who were fans of modern Who about the lack of entry points these days, episodes you can tell people to watch without having to say 'Well, to understand this episode, you need to know this, this and this ...' A Christmas special, which will get viewers other episodes won't get, should be an entry point - instead, this episode was incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't seen every episode of the last four years (I have, and I still didn't know what was happening half the time).

The problem remains, I think, that Moffat is over-committed. 'The Day of the Doctor' is really good. I have little doubt that the same will be true of the first episode of Season 3 of Sherlock. But in between, he seems to have decided 'oh, this'll do' for Christmas, and it really won't. I think the time has come for Moffat to move on from Who, and hope he will by the end of the next Series. But we'll probably get Chris Chibnall instead ... Chibnall's a bit variable. The Chibnall responsible for Broadchurch might do an interesting job - that who made Torchwood or Camelot can please go away.

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Renny Harlin once made a good movie that I enjoyed. It's called The Long Kiss Goodnight, and yes, it's preposterous, and you do wonder why, given that he was married to Geena Davis at the time, he needs to contrive so many opportunities for her to be in her underwear, but it's a movie I always enjoy watching when it comes on telly, as it regularly does. Until The Legend of Hercules,I hadn't seen anything he's made since, and judging by his regular nominations for Golden Raspberries, I haven't missed anything.

The Legend of Hercules, renamed from Hercules to avoid confusion with another (and rather better) 2014 Hercules movie,* doesn't change my impression of Harlin's work in the slightest. It's poorly written, with plot threads discarded as soon as they are of no further interest, poorly directed, and poorly acted, with the improbably named Kellan Lutz, and his improbable pectorals, in the role of Hercules. And there's a Nemean Lion which is so poor it could hardly be worse had they got ventriloquist's dummy Lenny the Lion to do it.

The movie is a hodge-podge of bits taken from other, more accomplished movies. 300, of course, is referenced a lot, and there are a number of the sort of scenes that 300 made a norm, and which are all over Starz' Spartacus series, where exteriors in antiquity are apparently not convincing unless they are filmed in a studio. There's a lot of Gladiator, in scenes anachronistically set in the arena. But there's also nods towards Saving Private Ryan, Troy, Clash of the Titans - there's even a snowy funeral so reminiscent of Anthony Mann's Fall of the Roman Empire that it's hard to believe it's not deliberate, even though the reference would mean little to Harlin's main audience. Towards the end, there's a lengthy section that imitates (not too surprisingly) Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,before Hercules pulls down pillars to which he has been chained, a scene that ultimately goes back to the story of Samson, but which is found in the 1958 Hercules. And then the story suddenly goes all Thor for no readily apparent reason.

The Legend of Hercules is pretty free with its use of mythological characters (not necessarily a point against it); Iphicles and Amphitryon, Hercules' brother and father, are not particularly evil in the existing sources, but the movie needs them to be for the clichéd story it has chosen to tell. Hebe, the goddess who marries Hercules when he is admitted into the ranks of the immortals, here becomes the mortal love interest of the young son of Zeus. Other ancient Greek names are randomly employed - Iolaus, who mythographers will recognise as Hercules' nephew, and fans of The Legendary Journeys know as his best mate, appears as the child of Hercules' ally Sotiris. And there are even less important characters called Agamemnon and Creon.

The movie is also a good illustration of Gideon's Nisbet's argument that Hollywood often has difficultly presenting Greece on screen, because it ends up looking too much like Rome. This emerges not only in the obvious moments such as the arena sequences, where Kenneth Cranham's Lucius is done up in a shabby toga, but also in the battle scenes, where troops march complete with very Roman looking banners. The fact that a battlefield tactic is described as 'testudo' just demonstrates how little anyone involved cares about any distinction between Greece and Rome.

The movie almost does something interesting at the end. Hera has foreshadowed that peace does not lie in Hercules' future, and Hebe stabs herself rather than be used as a hostage by Iphicles, but then ... she doesn't die. Instead, in a twist that bears all the hallmarks of a post-test screening reshoot, Hercules gets the happy-ever-after ending that Hera said he would be denied, and precludes any sequels. They may already have realised that wouldn't be an issue.

* Indeed, when shown on Channel 5, where I saw it, the title had reverted to Hercules.

About Me

52-year old academic, currently working for the University of Roehampton. Also with roles in British Science Fiction Association and Science Fiction Foundation.
All views expressed here are my own, and should not be taken as representing those of any institution or organization I work for or am connected with.